How a defrocked judge became the chief legal enforcer for Maduro’s Venezuela
CARACAS, (Reuters) - Last March, Chief Justice Maikel Moreno shocked Venezuela when his Supreme Court nullified the powers of the National Assembly and transferred them to the 32-judge tribunal.
Even in a country used to political upheaval, the decision triggered major protests, forcing Moreno to roll back much of the move three days later.
But the power play illustrated Moreno’s role as enforcer for the embattled administration of President Nicolas Maduro, now branded a dictatorship by a growing number of governments, from France and the United States to South American neighbors Colombia and Peru.
The 51-year-old bodyguard-turned-judge and his court have overruled virtually every major law passed by the oppositionled assembly.
Moreno’s past, however, remains unknown even to most Venezuelans. To trace his ascent, Reuters examined documents and interviewed associates, colleagues and friends of the chief justice in five countries.
The picture that emerges is of a jurist who, by leveraging personal connections and handling politically sensitive cases that other lawyers and judges rejected, endeared himself to Maduro and fellow members of the late Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution.”
In his rise to Venezuela’s top judicial perch, Moreno left behind a past that includes allegations he participated in extortion and influencepeddling rackets and his arrest in 1989 on suspicions of killing a teenager, according to government documents and people familiar with his history.
Reuters found no evidence Moreno was ever tried or convicted of any criminal charges.
In a brief text-message exchange with Reuters on Nov. 7, Moreno said the allegations of jail time, long rumoured in Venezuela, were “invented” by sensationalists.
He offered to give Reuters an interview, but then did not respond to requests to schedule one. He did not respond to additional questions by text about his career or other episodes in which he was accused of wrongdoing.
Neither the Supreme Court nor Maduro’s government responded to separate requests for comment.
Documents including a 2006 intelligence report by the Supreme Court’s security division and a high court ruling against Moreno last decade point to episodes in which Moreno was accused of being on the wrong side of the law – from the 1989 shooting to his ouster as a lower court judge in 2007 for what the high court said was the improper release of two murder suspects.
Opponents of the Maduro government say Moreno is instrumental in propping up an administration that is increasingly
authoritarian.
In recent months, the top court has sentenced five opposition mayors to prison. It approved the ouster of Venezuela’s chief prosecutor, who fled the country in midAugust, joining a growing exodus of Maduro critics.
In May, Moreno’s court gave the green light for Maduro to proceed with the election that created the Constituent Assembly, a legislature that now supersedes the National Assembly and cemented for many the country’s tilt toward authoritarian rule. At least 125 people died in four months of protests that ensued after the court sought in March to neuter the assembly.
“The greatest affront to the people is to put a criminal in charge of the judicial system,” said Luis Velazquez, a former Venezuelan judge who investigated Moreno on behalf of the Supreme Court a decade before Maduro appointed Moreno to run the top bench.
During his investigation, Velazquez says he found an arrest record for Moreno after the 1989 shooting death of the teen and investigated a phone call in which another judge in a separate case recorded Moreno allegedly pressuring him to release a suspected arms and drug trafficker.
The chief justice is not the first senior Venezuelan official to be accused of abuse of power.
The U.S. government earlier this year accused Vice President Tareck El Aissami of drug trafficking. It sanctioned Maduro himself for having “deliberately and repeatedly abused the rights of citizens” with repressive tactics. And it sanctioned Moreno and seven other Supreme Court justices for allegedly usurping the legislature and “restricting the rights and thwarting the will of the Venezuelan people.”
Venezuela’s government has dismissed the accusations and criticized the sanctions, which bar Americans from engaging in business with any of the officials and freezes any assets the officials may have in U.S. jurisdictions.
El Aissami, the vice president, denied ties to the drug trade and slammed the United States on Twitter for “miserable provocations” and “vile aggression.”
Under Chavez and now Maduro, the economy has cratered and social stability has ruptured in a country that was once one of Latin America’s most prosperous and still boasts the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
After an October vote in which Maduro’s Socialist party candidates swept a majority of gubernatorial elections, the president dismissed accusations of fraud and defended the legitimacy of his government.
“I am not a dictator,” Maduro said. “I have a moustache and look like Stalin, but I’m not him.”
A HOMICIDE “RESOLVED” Little in the public record exists about Moreno’s youth. He was born on New Year’s Eve, 1965, in the eastern city of El Tigre, according to public tax and electoral documents.
In the late 1980s, court, intelligence and newspaper records show he worked as a bodyguard for then-President Carlos Andres Perez. It is not clear how he became a bodyguard or joined the president’s security detail.
That era in Venezuela, marked by food shortages and high inflation similar to the conditions roiling the country now, set the stage for the eventual entry of Chavez, a disgruntled leftist Army officer, into power.
With anger and hardship mounting, riots erupted in 1989. Hundreds of people died.
On the evening of April 26, Moreno and two other Perez bodyguards were in Parque Central, a working-class neighbourhood of Caracas, the capital, according to an account two days later in El Nacional, a national newspaper.
For reasons that are not clear, a brawl broke out. Ruben Gil, a 19-year-old student, entered the fray with a baseball bat, the newspaper said. The bodyguards opened fire, shooting Gil dead.
“Presidential Bodyguards Kill Youth,” read the front-page headline, above a picture of Gil’s weeping mother, Carmen Romelia Marquez de Gomez.
Police arrested Moreno, according to the newspaper account, people familiar with the incident and an intelligence report prepared a decade ago by the security division of Venezuela’s Supreme Court. A mugshot from his arrest, included in the report and dated the week after the killing, shows Moreno was arrested for “homicide.”
The Supreme Court commissioned the report, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, in 2006. The 32-member court was already aligned with the leftist government by then, because of appointments made by Chavez, but several judges there had begun to question Moreno’s rulings as a lower court judge.
The report, which has never before been made public, was signed by Luis Enrique Villoria Garcia, director general of the court’s security division at the time.
Reuters was unable to reach Villoria to discuss the report.
One page appears to be missing from the 19-page copy reviewed by Reuters.
But details from the report regarding the homicide and Moreno’s removal from the bench in 2007 were independently verified by people familiar with its contents. Those people include one senior government official, three former Supreme Court judges and three former senior intelligence officials.
Important details about the homicide and Moreno’s arrest remain unclear. Notably, Reuters was unable to find a paper trail documenting whether Moreno was tried, sentenced or imprisoned.
The Supreme Court report says he was jailed until sometime in 1990, and cites a criminal case number for a homicide charge against him, 522755, but Reuters could not find any files associated with the case.
A security guard at Lebrun, a central judicial archive in Caracas, would not grant Reuters access to records there. The Supreme Court did not respond to requests seeking permission to search the archive.
Gil’s mother died a decade ago, according to people close to the family.
Two people close to Gil told Reuters that witnesses and family members at the time of the brawl said Moreno fired the shot that killed the 19-year-old. These people, who requested anonymity, saying they were afraid of reprisals, said Gil had been a gang member and that an existing, but unspecified rivalry with Moreno had sparked the brawl.
One person, who says he saw Gil’s body in a Caracas morgue, said the young man was shot in the back. Gil’s death certificate, reviewed by Reuters, cites gunshot as the cause of death.
Three people close to the family said legal proceedings followed Gil’s death, but none of them knew what became of the case. “I have wanted to denounce him for years, but I have been too scared,” one of these people said.
Moreno has never publicly denied, confirmed or discussed shooting Gil.
He told friends and colleagues the killing was in self-defence, according to a person close to Moreno who spoke on condition of anonymity. Another person, who also asked not to be named, told Reuters that Moreno said any fallout from the killing had been “resolved.”
At some point in 1990, according to the intelligence report, Moreno was released from jail. It said he had received “an ille- gally granted procedural benefit” but gave no further details about his release.
In the text exchange with Reuters, Moreno disputed the assertion of jail time, saying it and the other details from the report “are not true either.” He did not clarify or directly address other specifics from the report.
“POLITICAL CASES” Once free, Moreno pursued a law degree at Santa Maria University, in Caracas. He worked as a bailiff while he studied, according to his official biography.
While Moreno studied, Chavez in 1992 led a failed coup attempt against Perez’s increasingly unpopular government. Chavez was jailed, but freed in 1994 thanks to the work of Cilia Flores, a firebrand attorney fond of leftist causes.